Cyber: Why Active Directory Password Resets Are Surging In Hybrid Work
Back when everyone worked in the office, password resets were annoying but manageable. If someone forgot their credentials, they walked down the hall to IT and got back to work within minutes. The interaction was quick, the fix was immediate, and life went on.
But hybrid work changed that. Now, when employees can't access their accounts, they're sitting at home or in a coffee shop, unable to work until IT gets around to their ticket.
The helpdesk can't just walk over to troubleshoot; they're fielding calls from people scattered across cities, time zones, and home networks with varying levels of connectivity.
What used to be a minor interruption has become a productivity drain that costs organizations far more than most realize.
The shift to distributed work isn't a temporary trend waiting to reverse itself. Since 2022, work location patterns have remained remarkably stable. Today, 51% of remote-capable US employees work in a hybrid model, with hybrid workers spending an average of 2.3 days per week in the office.
This is the new normal, and the operational challenges that came with this shift caught many IT teams off guard.
Password resets, which Gartner found already accounted for 40% of helpdesk calls, have gotten worse in distributed work environments. The reason isn't that people suddenly became more forgetful. It's that the technical landscape has changed.
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Remote employees experience more lockouts because credentials cached on their laptops become outdated when they aren’t consistently connected to the corporate network.
For example, an employee may change their password while connected via a virtual private network (VPN), then try to log in the next morning using cached credentials on their local machine.
Source: BleepingComputer
